Founded in 1990 by Alan Caruba, a business and science writer, the Center is a clearinghouse for information about "scare campaigns" designed to influence public opinion and policies. Read Caruba's daily commentaries at "Warning Signs" (see favorite sites)
Email acaruba@aol.com or acaruba1321@gmail.com.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

It’s
bad enough when major environmental organizations continue to lie about a
“global warming” that does not exist in lieu of a planetary cooling cycle now
entering its 17th year, but when those allied with the United
Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are also in charge of
producing a government report on it, the public is being lied to in ways that
obscure their bias and agenda.

This is
the case of the recently released draft report of the National Climate
Assessment and Development Advisory Committee (NCADAC) titled “Climate
Change and the American People.” The majority of the thirteen senior
scientists responsible for it are closely allied with the IPCC. No doubt, the
final report will be cited by the IPCC as further “proof” that global warming is
real.

The
Liar-in-Chief about global warming—AKA climate change—is President Obama who,
during his second inaugural speech managed to ignore any mention of the nation’s
catastrophic debt in favor of warning that climate change is causing forest
fires, drought, and powerful storms. Excuse me, but the climate has always
included these natural events. They are not the result of a warming that is not
occurring.

Some
believe that an effort is afoot to revive cap-and-trade
legislation that would tax so-called greenhouse gas emissions despite the
fact that they play no role in either climate change or the bogus global
warming. Others think that the EPA will be used as the blunt instrument to
restrict emissions.

It is
troubling enough that a January 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal included a
commentary by Bjorn
Lomborg, author and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in
Washington, D.C., that criticized the President’s speech at the same time saying
“This does not mean that climate change isn’t an issue. In the long run, the
world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes global warming.”

No,
carbon dioxide (CO2) doesn’t cause something that isn’t happening. It causes all
the vegetation on Earth to thrive and that is why greenhouses increase it in
order to stimulate growth. Reducing it via government regulation threatens the
entire economy.

According to the NCADAC report,
rising temperatures pose a health threat. They are not rising and countless
retirees head to warmer states for the simple reason that warmer weather extends
life while colder weather kills people. People who live in Florida and the
Southwest are not moving to Minnesota or Alaska.

As
Steve Gorham, the author of “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and
Climate Change Mania”, has pointed out regarding the NCADAC report, “The
document uses the word ‘extreme’ more than 600 times to create an alarming
picture of the future. It predicts ‘extreme weather events…extreme
weather…extreme snowstorms…extreme winds…extreme drought…extreme floods…extreme
rainfall’ and many other ‘extremes’, all claimed to be due to mankind’s
relatively small emissions of CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere. The report’s
conclusions are based on computer model projections.”

Environmental studies professor,
Roger Pielke Jr., notes that among those in charge of the latest government
report are its chairman, biologist Jerry Melillo whose online bio cites his
“long association with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” One of
its vice chairmen, economics professor Gary Yohe has the same credential. Others
affiliated with the IPCC are James Buizer, Sharon Hayes, Thomas Karl, Susanne
Moser, Richard Moss, and Donald Wuebbles whose academic bio says he “shares in
the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the international Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.”

The
connections between these folks and environmental organizations include the fact
that vice-chair Gary Yohe is part of a World Wildlife Fund panel and Richard
Moss used to be employed as a WWF vice president. The WWF is one of the leading
advocates of global warming. James Buizer is on the board of directors of Second
Nature a group whose mission is to create a sustainable society by transforming
higher education. In other words, ensuring that yet another generation passing
through our universities absorb the global warming hoax.

The
federal government has been funding these bogus reports and “research” about
global warming to the tune of billions of dollars for years. The entire purpose
is to keep the hoax alive and it has ensured that agencies such as NOAA and NASA
have participated. Other than Al Gore, the leading proponent of global warming
has been James Hansen who continues to head NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies.

It is
so bad at NASA that, in February 2012, a group of twenty former NASA scientists
formed a group called The Right Climate Stuff to dispute and debunk the many
lies associated with global warming.

Fundamentally, you cannot trust
anything the federal government, nor its lackeys in the mainstream media,
regarding anything you read or hear about global warming or climate change. It
is a tsunami of lies.

Monday, January 21, 2013

In his
second inaugural speech, Barack Obama said, “We must respond to the threat of
climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and
future generations”?

To what
“climate change” is Obama referring? Is it the now thoroughly debunked “global
warming” hoax? Is it the climate change of the 11,500 years since the last ice
age? Or is it “the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought,
and more powerful storms” to which Obama referred?

If it
is the latter, does anyone actually believe that these natural events can be
mitigated by anything Americans or the entire population of the world can do?
Did any among the thousands in attendance at the inauguration, shivering in the
frigid weather, wonder what the President was talking about or
why?

After
more than three decades of being told that the Earth was dangerously heating up
by people like Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
there are more voices warning that the current cold cycle that will last, at a
minimum, several decades.

The
public continues to be misled to the mainstream media and, more importantly, by
the federal government whose increased environmental regulations are based on
the global warming lies, so who can you believe?

Publications such as Science magazine
have been so politicized at this point as to be virtually useless. Roger Pielke
Jr., a professor of environmental studies, recently released a study that
updates his study of the magazine, noted that “In a 2009 paper I documented that
Science magazine published 40 editorials critical of the Bush Administration
during its two terms, and only 1 such critique of the Clinton Administration’s
previous 2 terms. I have just updated this analysis through the first term of
the Obama Administration, and found no editorials critical of the Obama
Administration.”

It
should be noted that Obama routinely refers to “climate change”, the new name
for “global warming”, and has already wasted billions on “renewable” energy,
wind and solar, including algae, otherwise known as pond scum. The Obama EPA is
releasing an avalanche of new regulations based in part on the “global warming”
myths and dubious “science” regarding levels of pollution that are
worthless.

Recently I received a book by John L.
Casey, “Cold Sun: A Dangerous ‘Hibernation’ of the Sun Has Begun” ($14.50,
Trafford Publishing, softcover), the president of the Space and Science Research
Corporation (SPSC). It is essentially a one-man operation and Casey’s book is an
effort to warn the public about the fact that the sun has entered a cycle of
very low sunspot activity. More sunspots mean warming weather and fewer mean
cold weather. SPSC has the support of a number of scientists who concur that the
planet has entered a cooling cycle, something well known to meteorologists,
climatologists, and solar scientists, even if it remains generally unknown to
the public.

Casey
has been issuing press releases since 2007 warning of a decades-long period of
cooling that will likely have some extremely serious effects on the planet that
include droughts, increased volcanic activity, earthquakes, and the death of
millions as the history of such events in the past demonstrates. He is candid
about his credentials and the lack of response he has gotten from the media and
those in the government he has tried to inform.

Of one
release, he says that “In fact, it was seen with even less credulity since it
was proposed by someone essentially unknown in the professional climate science
community, a person without any past record of university research and not one
published paper in any scientific journal.” It would be easy to dismiss Casey,
but he has been a consultant to NASA, “performing space shuttle and space
station analysis” and done studies for the Department of Defense “performing
rocket launch studies.” He has a BS degree in physics and mathematics and a MA
in management. So it can be said he has extensive experience in areas that
require a sound body of knowledge.

Others
are also forecasting a serious cold cycle. In January 2012, Habilbullo
Abdusamatov, a scientist from the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of
Sciences predicted a sharp drop in temperature starting in 2014 and a new
“little” ice age that will last at least two centuries with a peak in 2055. It
would be the fifth such event over the past nine centuries, the last of which
lasted from 1300 to 1850 when the last warming cycle began.

In
January 2012, Wall Street Journal science columnist Matt Ridley, noted that the
cycle of warm weather between ice ages that the Earth has been enjoying “is
already 11,600 years old, and it must surely in the normal course of things,
come to an end.”

One
of the leading authorities on ice ages, Robert W. Felix, author of “Not By Fire,
But By Ice”, like Casey, became fascinated with ice age cycles and spent eight
years studying them before publishing his book in 2005. He maintains a website,
www.iceagenow.info that is well worth visiting as he
documents the weather events of our current cold cycle and the advent of a new
ice age.

Casey’s
book reflects his mission to educate the public to the dangers of a sun whose
low number of sunspots (magnetic storms) is well known among solar scientists
and generally under-reported. “This particular solar cycle (#24) peak is one of
the lowest since cycle #14 in 1906 which had approximately 64 sunspots,” Casey
told me. “We measure each solar maximum every eleven years to determine the
average of solar activity by sunspot count. We have had solar maximums in the
past there were over 200 sunspots and some as low as 50. The relevance of
information about the number of sunspots is that when the count goes below 50 we
enter a much colder climate era.”

Some
will dismiss Casey for not having the credentials of climatologists and
meteorologists. Many with these credentials jumped on the global warming hoax by
way of securing grants and other funding. A courageous few debunked global
warming until it became obvious that it was a lie. There will be those who will
dismiss his warning as hyperbole. In “Cold Sun” he says “A historic reduction in
the energy output of the Sun has begun. The most likely outcome from this ‘solar
hibernation’ will be widespread global loss of life and social, economic, and
political disruption.”

As the
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said, “All truth passes
through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” It is very likely that as the
current cooling cycle—now over 16 years old—wlll increase, Robert W. Felix’s,
Casey’s, and others with traditional credentials in meteorology, climatology,
geology and physics will eventually be heeded and the Big Chill will have become
self-evident.

Monday, January 14, 2013

“What’s
in worse shape””, asked the Heartland Institute’s Director of Communications, Jim
Lakely, in a January 11th blog post. “The state of the Earth’s
climate? Or the state of the New York Times? Global temperatures are not rising
all that quickly, so the Earth is doing fine. Meanwhile, the Old Gray Lady is
shutting down its Environmental Desk.”

TheHeartland Institute has cause to
celebrate because it has led the effort to debunk the global warming hoax,
sponsoring international conferences that brought together the world’s leading
scientists and others to demonstrate how specious the alleged “science” of
global warming was and is. It did so in the face of a United Nations agenda to
advance the hoax and a compliant and cooperative media that did nothing to
dispute it.

In the
interest of full disclosure, I have been an unpaid policy advisor to The
Heartland Institute for many years, only once receiving a small grant many years
ago to help fund research involving the global warming hoax. These days
donations to my blog help sustain the effort.

As the
planet enters its seventeenth year in which temperatures have been steadily
falling in response to a natural cooling cycle, the result of reduced solar
radiation, the global warming hoax is finally being revealed as an instrument of
the United Nations and individual governments, including our own, to impose
“carbon taxes” that would raise billions of dollars for everyone
involved.

The New
York Times with its vaunted reputation has been suffering the same fate as many
daily newspapers in the U.S., as well as news magazines such as Newsweek and
Time. The rise of the Internet has bled off advertising revenue, but I maintain
that as alternative sources of information became available, the Times and the
mainstream media has suffered a loss of credibility across the spectrum of news
topics.

In the
case of the Times, however, their journalistic sins were much worse than others
because it led the global warming hoax from its beginning, never failing to fill
its pages about rising sea levels (they’re not rising precipitously), declining
polar bear populations (they’ve increased), and using every weather event from
hurricanes to tornadoes to droughts (all cyclical and natural) to shout about a
“global warming” caused by carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas emissions”
that had nothing whatever to do with a non-existent threat to the nation and the
planet.

Bluntly stated, the Times
lied about global warming—now called “climate change”—on a daily basis.

The
Times Environmental Desk had a team of editors and reporters that never lost an
opportunity to further the greatest hoax of the modern era and one can only hope
that reporters like Andrew Revkin will be reassigned to cover high school
football and soccer games in the tri-state area. On his Facebook page, Revkin
said he was never a fan of the desk even though he worked for it and lamented
the elimination of an environmental editor. It is doubtful, however, that the
Times will eliminate its editors and teams that cover the White House, Congress,
and other activities of interest to readers, including
sports.

Maybe
it was just serendipitous—the Times has been cutting back on staff for quite
some time now—but I believe the news that the poster boy of global warming, Al
Gore, had sold his television channel, Current, to al Jazeera, a notably
anti-American channel that gained fame broadcasting Osama bin Laden’s rants, was
the “final straw” that led to the decision to shut down its Environmental
Desk.

In a
January 11thWall
Street Journal commentary, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., wrote that “Mr. Gore and
his allies wore out their welcome with their exaggerations, their
self-righteousness, and their perfectly foolish insistence that a plurality of
voters could be morally bullied into giving up their self-interest if chastised
long and loudly enough by Mr. Gore.” His commentary took to task the lies of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that extrapolated from
1.58% of the Earth surface—the lower 49 U.S. states—to suggest a global warming
phenomenon.

The
public did not rush to purchase electric cars, nor did they install expensive
solar panels on the roofs of their homes. Instead they worried about the price
of gasoline and the rising cost of electricity and other expenses whose costs
have been increased by extraordinary bad “environmental” laws and regulations
such as the requirement that ethanol be added to each gallon, increasing is cost
while decreasing mileage, and destroying the engines under the hoods of millions
of automobiles. As forty percent of the nation’s corn crop was siphoned off to
make ethanol the cost of most food items at the supermarket increased as
well.

The
good news is that there will not be an environmental editor or deputy
environmental editor at the Times, nor seven reporters whose sole job was to
report lies intended to advance and bolster the agenda of the Environmental
Protection Agency, NOAA, and the agendas of heavily funded environmental
organizations such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the World
Wildlife Federation.

The
“newspaper of record” has debased itself and the profession of journalism for
too long as a leading participant in the progressive movement’s effort to impose
socialism on the greatest example of the power of capitalism and the free
market—the United States—the world has ever known.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Prior
to the November elections, I received an email that was chilling. It was about
the new Obamacare rules. Before I discuss the Obamacare taxes that are kicking
in this year and next, I want to share excerpts from it.

The
email was from an individual whose son-in-law has a brother who is a surgeon at
Emory Hospital in Atlanta. It is ranked high among American hospitals. This is
what he related:

“A
group of non-doctors, from 'our' country's Department of Health arrived last
week at Emory for a two day session and is on their rounds around the country to
make sure every hospital fully understands the new rules (which start in
December (after the elections) concerning treating all patients over 70 years of
age.”

“This group
informed the staff Emory and all the doctors present that they will very soon
not be allowed to operate on anyone over 70 (no matter how urgent or life
threatening the situation is), without first having it approved by a board of
eight doctors. Failure to comply will result in a huge financial burden to the
hospital and more than likely the doctor will lose his/her ability to practice
medicine anywhere in the country.”

“This
board is to be established at every hospital in the country and the board
members will only work eight hours a day…the DOH group almost got lynched at
this point by the doctors who were present. The point that got the Emory doctors
so upset originally was that the "Death Board" will be available only 8 hours
during the day. And once their 8 hour shift is up, they may have to wait 16
hours to get in touch with them and another hour or two or three to get a
decision and permission to operate.”

This
is, however, anecdotal. Despite efforts to confirm whether this is a new,
official policy, no confirmation could be found and, it should be noted that
there have been numerous efforts to debunk what former Alaska Governor Sarah
Palin dubbed “death panels.”

If
the report of the visit to Emory Hospital is accurate, fears of death panels are
true. If you or a member of your family is over age 70, Obamacare could lead to
denied service and even death. According to an article in a December issue of U.S.
News and World Report, this process, is also likely to include women seeking
mammograms to detect breast cancer and even premature babies and infants in need
of preventative treatment for a virus. So every American is now at risk if they
have life-threatening health care needs.

If
this seems fanciful, consider reports out of the United
Kingdom where they have had socialized medicine for decades. There, both the
elderly and sick babies are at risk of being abandoned by National Health
Service hospitals.

Officially
called the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obamacare will surely migrate into a
bureaucratic death sentence for an American healthcare system once deemed the
best in the world.

In
the course of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations Congress actually repealed a
section of the ACA, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports
affecting people who need long-term care. It is likely that as the 2,000-plus
pages of ACA are examined in greater detail by Congress, further dismantling
will occur. It needs to be entirely repealed, something the House voted for, but
which was deep-sixed in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and Obama would surely
veto any effort to do so.

Obamacare’s
taxes have arrived and they include another investment tax increase for
taxpayers with taxable income exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles). There
is also another payroll tax increase of 0.9 percent in the hospital insurance
portion of the payroll tax. There is a new tax on medical devices of 2.3 percent
affecting manufacturers and importers on all their sales. This increase will be
passed along to consumers.

There
is a reduction in the income tax deduction for individual’s medical expenses and
the elimination of the corporate income tax deduction for expenses related to
the Medicare Part D subsidy and a limitation of the corporate income tax
deduction for compensation that health insurance companies pay to their
executives.

These
ACA tax increases are in addition to a variety of other deductions that
taxpayers have previously been allowed to take; in addition to a death tax
increase there was the elimination of full expensing of capital
purchases.

The
news about Obamacare just keeps getting worse. Actuaries at the management
consulting firm Oliver Wyman are predicting that the law’s age rating
restrictions could mean a 42 percent hike in premium costs for people aged 21 to
29 when buying individual coverage.

After
the Supreme Court ruled that ACA is a tax, the Congressional Budget Office did
an update of its scoring of the law and concluded that Obamacare will spend $1.7
trillion over ten years on its coverage expansion provisions alone, including a
massive expansion of Medicaid and federal subsidies for the new health insurance
exchanges. This translates to federal health spending by 15
percent.

Infants,
the young, middle aged and older, all will find their costs for medical care
increase or even be denied. There is nothing “affordable” about Obamacare. It is
a draconian threat to every American.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

By Alan Caruba

To the
naïve and uninformed, the Environmental Protection Agency exists to ensure clean
air and water in the nation. That was its initial mandate when it was created by
an executive order by President Nixon in 1970. It has since become a nation
killer.

In 2013
a flood of regulations will cost thousands of Americans their jobs and drive
more industry overseas to avoid the cost of doing business in America. It will
drive up the cost of energy from electricity, along with the cost of gas and
diesel fuel. It will effectively kill much of the coal mining industry in a
nation that is the Saudi Arabia of coal, an energy source that formerly provided
fifty percent of all electricity in America.

The EPA
is girding
up to kill “fracking”, a technology that has safely been in use for decades
and one that holds the promise of further provision of natural gas. The
provision of oil is being thwarted as well; mostly famously by Obama’s
derailment of the Keystone XL pipeline in a nation laced with energy-providing
pipelines. Energy, the lifeblood of the nation, will be under attack as never
before.

A new
EPA ozone standard will occur, one that the EPA estimates would cost $90 billion
a year while other studies put the figure at nearly a trillion dollars and
destroy 7.4 million jobs. The EPA’s projections are that 650 additional
communities would be deemed “non-compliant” and effectively ensure plant
closings and that no new manufacturing and other businesses would set up shop.

The EPA
has pushed to regulate—control—every body of water in America, no matter how
small. A recent court decision derailed EPA storm-water regulations that would
have established a first-time standard for post-construction storm-water runoff
could include mandates on cities to change existing buildings, storm-water sewer
systems, and streets. It would have been the most expensive rule in EPA
history.

The EPA
will release regulations on the manufacture of cement—the MACT rule—that would
increase the cost of manufacturing this essential element of construction by 22%
to 36%. Many such plants would have to close and the U.S. would have to import
cement from nations like China.

Expect
regulations on cooling towers to protect fish under the Clean Water Act. A
proposed coal ash rule could cost between $79 to $110 billion over the next
twenty years, ending between 183,900 and 316,000 jobs over 20 years, affecting
states that include Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Missouri. The EPA has
been regulating “farm dust” for decades and new rules would affect the nation’s
food supplies as farmers and ranchers adjust by raising fewer livestock and the
till fewer fields. Spill prevention rules would further impact farmers and
ranchers.

If you
were asked what is the most costly federal agency which would you suggest?
Would it be the
Department of Homeland Security? Department of Defense? Labor? Agriculture?
Housing and Urban Development? Transportation?

The
Competitive Enterprise Institute recently published a report by Ryan Young, a
Fellow in Regulatory Studies, regarding the EPA and it is further testimony to
the way this predatory agency has gone from the first year of its operation in
1971, costing $701 million, to outlays in 2011 of $10.722 billion, employing
20,610 full-time workers.

The
public is expected to believe that this army of environmental bureaucrats are
all diligently saving Americans from particulates in the air, rain run-offs in
the water, any pesticide that might actually protect them from pests, and the
countless other life-threatening dangers that required, from 1999 to 2011, a
total of 4,995 rules in the “Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and
Deregulatory Actions.”

These
regulations have little to do with clean air and water and everything to do with
destroying the nation’s economy, putting thousands out of work at a time when
economic growth is barely occurring, and new taxes will further reduce the
spending and investment power of Americans.

Reacting to the news of her
forthcoming resignation, S.T. Kornick, Director of Research for The Heartland Institute, said, “Jackson
played the environmental ‘bad cop’ to President Obama’s ‘good cop’, but the
result of their tag-team effort has been a huge expansion of the EPA’s power.
Appointing another bad cop to head the EPA could by itself push the nation into
recession.”

The
most powerful economy in the world is being destroyed from within by an agency
that has declared war on America. It must be downsized and restrained if the
nation is to survive.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.